Flew Jetstar business for the first time, from Singapore to Melbourne, and it was an awful experience.

I’ll get the two positives out of the way – 1. The flight took off on time and landed 30 minutes early. This is always good. 2. For business class passengers they do not enforce the baggage limits at all. I asked at check in if they wanted to weigh my carry on, the man said you’re in business class, we aren’t worried how much you have!

Now for what I didn’t like. The boarding, they made an announcement for business class passengers to board first, que a mad rush to the gate and of the 10 people around me I was the only one able to go to the first door, the rest had seats in aisles 29 and 32 etc, and were ushered into economy with no-one pulling them up for queue jumping.

The seat itself is archaic and tatty, something probably found in Qantas domestic business in the 90s. There may be an extra inch to an economy seat in width, the only positive is the separation from the seat next to you so your legs aren’t touching. The ‘extra’ leg room is hardly existent, the pitch is barely superior to the leg room in Economy on a Qantas A380, which again is further encroached by the person in front of you reclining. If you want to get up when the seat in front is fully reclined you have to do a contortionist move to avoid pulling down on the seat to lift yourself up.

The food is certainly no better than other airlines economy and was worse than I have had on premium airlines like Cathay Pacific.

The entertainment, when you have it, is good. They give you an iPad preloaded with movies, TV, albums etc and the noise cancelling headphones do just that. But you get it an hour after take off and they take it away 70mins before landing. So you don’t have IFE for the whole time.

It is not business class. If you picture people with sleeve tattos wearing singlets and thongs in business class, it’s not business is it? Well this is exactly what Jetstar delivers. It is a budget airline, and one not patronised by savvy frequent flyers wanting to save, but by people who are only flying because they can for such a low price.

In a word – awful.

Do yourself a favour – for the same price as JQ Business you can fly economy with CX, MH or SQ, and this will be a far more enjoyable flight.

You probably flew on the older A330s. If the second row had a seat missing in front of 2D (to give much more legroom) then it’s the older version. I have flown that and the newer aircraft and the newer ones have nice new leather seats with individual IFEs built into the seatback in front of you. The food offering both times wasn’t too bad…they offered a grazing menu (as they call it) and the dessert trolley laden with cheese, fruit and cake accompanied by cognac and dessert wine was a pleasant surprise.

Yes the seating is cramped for a premuim cabin but at these prices and for daytime flights it’s good value especially if you don’t want to accumulate Qantas miles and status credits (which are now incredibly expensive with the new max bundle pricing to enable accumulation). Unfortunately nighttime flying in those seats is an uncomfortable experience.

The chief attraction of Jetstar for me was a cheap way to get to Asia from Australia (daytime flights only) in a non-economy seat and sometimes to join a flight to Europe where business class fares are significantly cheaper than ex-Australia. Now with the unappealing max bundle extra cost for getting points and status credits it’s less appealing but still worth considering if the alternative is a fully laden economy class, given I’m over 6ft tall.

This is no surprise to me. This is the low cost off shoot of Qantas and my experience over the summer , albeit in economy was even worse. Ground service at SIN was pitiful and once on board it was clear this was an inept and unprofessional outfit. I was grateful to get off and thankful there had not been an incident. The crew were shocking.having flown easy jet and air Asia both of which are in a different league. to be avoided at all costs.